


And the summer night is fragrant with a mighty expectation of relief

by armadillo1976



Category: due South
Genre: F/M, Kid Fic, M/M, Other, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-18
Updated: 2013-12-18
Packaged: 2018-01-05 00:55:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1087674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/armadillo1976/pseuds/armadillo1976
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written to a prompt by seramirez: "Ray wants kids. Fraser loves kids. I love stories about them having kids, but I wish there were more in which the kid's mom was alive, not evil, and involved in her child's life."</p>
            </blockquote>





	And the summer night is fragrant with a mighty expectation of relief

**Author's Note:**

  * For [seramirez (boxofdelights)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/boxofdelights/gifts).



It all started, like so many good things in life, with dread, mayhem, and misery.

The mayhem was actually happy in nature, if you discount the significant material loss that came with it – and Jason Tremblay, Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, was glad to discount it, owing partially to his overall mellow attitude, and partially to his years of experience with these things. ‘Collateral damage, and I didn’t particularly care much for this chair anyway’, he waived his hand dismissively. ‘They are amazingly cute, though, aren’t they?’

The dread and misery, on the other hand, were real, and the accumulation of them –  overflow, really – eventually set everything in motion.

***

It was Welsh that was supposed to go, but Welsh is afraid of flying – you wouldn’t know it looking at him, but there you go – and the notion of flying over the ocean gave him cold sweats. So one day he said, ‘That’s a Polish name, Kowalski, yeah?’ Which, I know a trap when I hear one, and I was so not going to walk into it. But orders are orders, clumsy intro lines or not, and that’s how I ended up in Warsaw in November 2002, on a team of Chicago PD folks, there to provide advice and whatnot to the Polish police force, given how we were so freakin’ advanced and they were, well, not. I never really knew what the whole deal was about, some over-our-heads political stuff. We spent a week there, discussing interrogation techniques, ogling the interpreters, and drinking more vodka that I had ever thought possible. By the time we were boarding the plane back home, I was wrecked.

“Home” right then was quite a new thing. Vecchio had gotten pulled from his mob stint a while earlier, and was again working at the 2-7, and so I was back to being just the regular me. Welsh had got his hands on a bit of extra funding though, and asked me to stay on too. I was happy to oblige, because I had enough changes in life otherwise, and was happy to keep some of the same ol’ same ol’ for a while. The thing was, Fraser and I had had our moments of revelation several months before that, and I was happy, I was so happy my seams were bursting, but there was stuff to figure out. Work just taking care of itself good, was greatness.

Anyway, the weather in Warsaw that day was a bitch. It was miserable out, dark and sleeting, and they kept us seated on the plane for ages before it moved at all. The guys from our team got seats closer to the back, mostly clustered together, but I had asked for aisle and the only aisle seat they could give me was midway through the plane. I figured I’d get some sleep, maybe try to lose the headache I’d had non stop, because I may be Polish but the vodka tolerance gene clearly did not get passed on to me. So I was trying to make myself comfortable there, with the little pillow they give you and a folded jacket, but this chick next to me was non-stop fidgeting in her seat. I looked at her and she was clearly not doing all right there, and before she even managed to say a word, I was up, and she was out and in the restroom in two seconds flat. Can’t say it made me look forward to the rest of the trip.

She was out to the lavatory another two times before we even took off. After the third time, when we were done with the whole dance of seat belt off, me getting up, her squeezing by, then coming back, both of us sitting down, seatbelts on, aaaand repeat –  I finally thought to have a good look at her, at which she went all ‘ _Przepraszam pana bardzo_ ’, and ha! I actually knew what that meant. My Polish is mostly swearwords, but the word for “I’m sorry” I’ve got down pat, ‘cause it worked on my Mama like a charm when I was little. So I’m like, ‘All right, all right, no problem’, which only made her go on apologising, but now in English. Turned out she was from Chicago too, going back home, and something was clearly wrong, but she was just as clearly not willing to say so.

Finally we took off, and as soon as the seatbelt sign blinked out, she was up again, and this time she was holding her hand to her mouth and trying not to retch and it was frankly unmistakable what her problem was. So, when she was in the lavatory again, I moved to the middle seat, and when she got back, I told her to just sit by the damn aisle, spare us both the fuss. At which point she looked at me all grateful, gave me a small smile, and the next second she was puking straight on my jacket.

Not really pretty, what happened after, what with me swearing and her being mortified and the stewardess wringing her arms and my jacket stinking up to high heaven. But, we got it sorted out eventually. The stewardess took the jacket and mumbled that she was going to take care of it. For all I know, she just dumped it straight outside. The chick took the aisle seat, and the tissues somebody gave her, and once she was done apologising (which at that point I felt I honestly deserved), she thought to introduce herself, and that was a fun moment when she held out her hand and said:

‘I’m Martha. Martha Kowalski.’

***

The phone’s ringing carried through the whole duplex, until finally Martha yelled ‘I’m coming, I’m _coming_!’ and picked up.

‘Martha? This is Jason Tremblay, from the stables.’

‘Oh hi! How are you?’

‘I’m good, I’m good, thank you. Yourself?’

‘I’m good, Jason, thanks. What’s up?’

‘There is an issue, I’m afraid.’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I have Zoe here, and she --’

‘ _Our_ Zoe? How on earth….?’

‘She took the L, she told me.’

‘Is she all right?! How-- Oh, Jason, I’m sorry, I--’

‘She is right here. Shall I put her on?’

There was some rustling and a sound of a conversation further away from the phone, but Martha was not really noticing. Standing stock-still in the middle of the room, she did not know what was going on, and she hated, _hated_ not knowing.

‘Hi, Mom’, a clear if somewhat hesitant voice came on.

‘Zoe, baby, what happened? Why did you-- How come-- what’s wrong?’ She was babbling, she knew, but there was no reason at all for Zo to be anywhere else than her after-school French class right now.

‘Mom, I’m OK, nothing is wrong. But I need you to listen to me.’ It would be funny, how Zo was using the exact same sentence Martha used all the time – with the exact same calm intonation, the focused pressure – except the whole situation was not funny at all.

‘I’m listening, baby’, she forced herself to say, and the she forced herself to sit down on the floor, and she forced herself to breathe deep, in-out, in-out.

‘I’m going to stay here with doctor Tremblay now, Mom. And with the dogs. I can sleep with the horses, there are sleeping bags. I am going to stay here, Mom. Please tell Dad and Tata, ok?’

Relief rushed through Martha from the top of her head to the ends of her toes, because it was absurd, it was nothing – and yet at the same time the dread started creeping back in, moving in the opposite direction, first just an uneasy feeling around the periphery, and growing. You had to know Zoe to appreciate her, and Martha did. Zoe was not the kind of person to say things she did not mean. Zoe, apparently genetically predisposed to be direct and unafraid just like her mother, was further molded into the no-bullshit attitude under the tutelage of Ray, the ultimate no-bullshit-taker, with finishing touches from Benton, who taught her (by steady example, excruciating lectures, and assorted Inuit folk tales) the importance of a strong moral core.

‘You’re going to stay tonight?’

‘Stay with the dogs.’

‘Zoe, the dogs are staying with doctor Tremblay for another month or so, and then they are going to their homes!’

‘I know that’, and was Zoe’s voice shaking now? ‘But when they are here, I want to be here too.’

The door opened slowly, Dief’s head pushing in. Martha lifted her hand and the wolf surged towards the caress. She scratched his ear lightly, tangled her fingers in his long fur.

‘Zoe, baby, I hear you. I hear you. Can you put Doctor Tremblay back on the phone for me for now?’

On the other end of the line, silence stretched for a moment, and it was easy for Martha to picture her daughter, lips pinched, back straight, understanding that she had done what she had planned to do, and now it was time to brave whatever was going to come.

‘Jason, bless you, thank you for calling me!’ She started immediately when he came on. ‘Listen, I apologize. I had no idea she was planning anything of the sort. I’ll get the guys and we’ll be there as soon as we can. Could you do me a favor in the meantime? Just let her be, for a while? Have her help in the stables if you need anything done there, or just let her sit with the pups, pretend it’s all good? We’ll be there in an hour, hour fifteen, tops.’

***

‘Martha what?’, I said, because I can be quick-witted and clever like that. 

‘Martha Kowalski?’ The poor girl had no idea why that was weird, so what could I do? I shook her hand: ‘Ray Kowalski.’

After which we had the obvious conversation, how of course it is the most common Polish name, but what were the odds, yada-yada.

After the commotion was over, my headache decided I had not been paying it enough attention and it came back with such viciousness that I totally gave up, mashed my head into the damn tiny pillow, pushed the flimsy sleep mask over my face and forced my eyes shut for so long that I eventually fell asleep.

I woke up feeling foul, headache still raging triumphantly. Even with the mask on I could tell that that the plane had gone dark. It was mostly quiet, with just a few shuffling sounds of people nesting, hunkering down. I was parched. I wondered if I had slept through a meal. No way to tell just by sitting there in the dark, so I pulled the mask down a bit. Stilly groggy from sleep, it took me a while to realise: the chick Martha was sitting upright in her seat, hands folded neatly in her lap, eyes closed, and thick tears falling relentlessly on her cheeks, one by one, down her neck, into the collar of her shirt.

I’m not a good person, not really. I mean, I am a cop, so I am on the good side as a matter of principle, but deep down – not so much. I’m more of a “let me mind my own business” type of guy. So my first instinct, when I see a woman crying, and we have history together, in that she has already puked on me, is to remove myself from the situation. Slink away unnoticed, that’s me. Except that I was thirsty, and I wouldn’t mind a sandwich, and I wanted to check the time, and maybe chat with the stewardess, and I couldn’t do any of that while pretending to be asleep.

So that is how we got talking. I got from the stewardess two glasses of water, of which one was for Martha, and a couple of sandwiches, of which definitely both were for me. I put the water in front of her and I told her about the cop thing, and how cops can handle bad stuff, if bad stuff is happening, so maybe she wanted to talk. At the beginning, she wasn’t really into it, but she had a lot going against her: the plane dark and kind of intimate, the hushed tones, the fact that she was stuck there next to me. Also, for all she stopped crying the moment she saw I was up, her collar was still all wet.

And so, bit by bit, she told me what happened. She was born and bred in Chicago just like me, but her family had ties to Poland, much more than mine ever did. She visited, she spoke good Polish. Her maternal grandmother, who had lived with them in Chicago for years, decided a while back that she wanted to return to the town where she had lived as a girl, where her relatives still remained.

‘I wished she’d stayed. We had always been close. But I understood, you know? So when she said she wanted to go, we helped her go. That was last year. She moved in with my aunt, two streets down from another great-aunt. She was happy. She was also 78, and we knew it could happen, but it was still a shock. A stroke. My mom and I flew in as soon as we could, and we sat with her in the hospital, this awful, terrible hospital, but she wasn’t really there, at the end. And then she had another stroke, and she died.’

That was a sad story all right. Sure you cry when your favourite grandma passes away, just means that you are a real human being, with feelings and vulnerabilities and all. I started saying something about that, but she just made this face. She didn’t even shake her head, just this shadow moved over her eyes, and I knew that was not it.

‘What – you’re telling me that wasn’t sad for you?’

‘It was very sad for me.’ And while she sounded honest, I could tell that just meant that I was off, that was not it. Before I came up with anything smart, she closed her eyes and just told me.

‘After the funeral my mom went back home, but I stayed. I don’t even know why. I took a trip to the seaside, just sat at the beach staring at the sea. At a restaurant one evening this guy came over to my table, started talking. I let him come up to my room. I didn’t have any condoms and he didn’t have any either, and I knew I shouldn’t, but I just didn’t care. I didn’t care.’

My eyes jumped to her stomach the moment my mind made the connection.

‘Three weeks. It’s just a bunch of cells now’, she said immediately.

All right, then. All right.

***

Jason Tremblay accepted Martha’s request in his typical unperplexed manner. It was this willingness to take things in stride that made Martha so fond of him. She’d had come to appreciate Jason Tremblay very much in the time since her daughter, aged five, returned from her annual trip to Forth Smith with Benton to declare (albeit not literally in these words) that her interest from that day onwards lay solely in animals. Now, four years later, Zoe showed no signs of relenting. She was confident both riding horses and taking care of them; she was useful – in small but genuine ways – in Doctor Tremblay’s veterinary practice; she was Diefenbaker’s main caregiver.

Martha uncrossed her legs, leaned back against the wall, and petted Dief’s head a bit more.

‘It’s all your fault, wolf’, she said reproachfully. ‘Your babies are messing up my baby.’

Dief pretended not to hear her.

She pressed a button and the phone speed-dialed.

‘Hey, Benton. You very busy right now?’, she listened for a while, but then shook her head impatiently. ‘Never mind, doesn’t matter. Tell him whatever, you’ll finish up tomorrow. I need you to grab Ray right now and get your butts to the stables. Yep. Yep. I know. I know, I-- Benton! You wanna sit down for this one, ok? Ready? Zoe has run away, I guess you’d have to say. Mmmm. She’s taken the L to Jason’s and she told him she was going to stay with the dogs. Yeah, I talked to her. Yeah, no, she’s fine. Well, missed her French class, and I’m not sure if she had lunch, but I mean really, she sounded fine. Except for, you know, the “ran away from home” bit.’

She listened for another while, but clearly she was not feeling patient.

‘Benton, you know just as well as I know and as Ray knows what she wants. She wants to keep the dogs, and she wants to make a sled team out of them, and she wants to do that in Fort Smith, where she wants to live and work with you at the Park. All of which she has told each of us separately and all of us together something like a gazillion times, so I think we can safely assume that’s established. All right? We just need to go there and get her. My entire ambition here is to keep the overall level of upset to a minimum, and for her to maybe not hate all of us, or not hate at least some of us. OK? So I need to you to meet me there asap, with Ray. In the parking lot outside, so we can strategize before we go in?’

***

Fraser would know what to say to a confession like that. Of the two of us, Fraser is the one you want to be stuck on a plane with, grieving and pregnant, pukey and in tears. Fraser is soothing. Infuriating, too, but he can do soothing like a champ. Me, no. I’m nobody’s feel-good man.

We talked. I don’t remember the details so well. The crying stopped, and the vomiting at least subsided. Before we landed, I gave her my number at the station: a cop habit. She gave me hers too, scribbled on the airline napkin. _Martha Kowalski_ , it said, and – yeah, it was weird.

A couple of weeks later Frannie stuck her head into the archive room where I was getting frustrated trying to find a file that had to be there but wasn’t.

‘A lady in red is here to see you, Ray!’

A what?

I looked through the corridor towards my desk and there she was, Martha, in a dress the exact colour of Fraser’s serge.

‘Hi.’ She looked cautious, wary.

‘Hi! How are you? Everything all right?’

‘Yeah. Sorry to bother you at work. I called the number you gave me and they told me the address.’

‘Sure, sure. What can I do for you, Martha?’

She studied me for a while. ‘Can I buy you a drink after work?’

So now I had women show an interest, huh. Years of trying to no effect, and now that I was all set, I was getting offers? Life was so not fair. ‘Look, I’m flattered, all right? But I actually have a partner, and I don’t want to--’

‘No, no. Sorry.’ She cut in. ‘Well, not about your partner. But – just to talk. And I owe you for the jacket.’

So we agreed to meet at a bar not far from the station, and I called Fraser before I went, because we had no etiquette for things like that yet. We were good and easy when it was just between the two of us. After the shooting, and the hearings, and the sessions, and with Vecchio coming back, it was crazy intense for a while, definitely. But I fixed the stuff in the apartment that needed fixing, and we bought another nightstand lamp and some more dishes (and then also a new bigger sofa, just to celebrate), and we were getting settled. Sometimes at night, when he was asleep next to me, with the wolf snoring by the window, I lay there terrified of the sheer magnitude of it. Day-to-day, it was easy, but it was new. Getting drinks with a woman was new, definitely, and it was something for which we maybe needed a rule. Well, me getting drinks with a woman. Fraser, he could be getting drinks with any women he wanted, or the entire ensemble of the Chippendales for that matter, as far as I was concerned. He was the one person in the universe I trusted implicitly, explicitly and any other -plicitly, always.

‘Of course I don’t mind, Ray’, he said when I called and explained. ‘Why would I mind?’

To have this trust directed back at me was the same middle-of-the-night sort of terrifying, and I just told him to get us a pizza for dinner instead of belabouring the point. It was just a drink and a conversation with your friendly airplane cop anyway.

‘I’m sorry’, said Martha instantly when she saw me. ‘I shouldn’t have come. I shouldn’t be taking up your --’

It was my turn to cut in. ‘Hey – it’s cool. It’s nice seeing you again.’

She bowed her head a bit, accepting it, and gestured for the bartender.

‘So how are things?’

‘They’re fine. They actually really are. Just, let me tell you something. The…’ she hesitated. ‘Cells?’ She put a hand on her stomach, and I nodded.

‘Yeah. I’m keeping it, but I haven’t told anyone and I don’t want to yet. But now anybody that I talk to, there is this secret I’m keeping, no matter what we are talking about. It’s exhausting. And I thought, you are the only person who knows. I just wanted a conversation where the secret is out, and I don’t have to watch out for it. That’s all.’

‘A conversation about what?’

‘Your choice.’

And that is how we proceeded to discuss, in no particular order, the merits and demerits of assorted hockey teams, the North Side’s dance scene, the problems of running a small business (which, it turned out, Martha did, a boutique type travel agency) and the intricacies of RCMP - Chicago PD liaisons (because the whole story of Fraser came up very soon, since Martha seemed to be a firm believer in direct personal questions).

An hour in, she finished up her soda and thanked me: shook my hand, all formal. ‘I appreciate you spending time with me.’

‘You’re kidding me!’

‘Not at all. I’m a stranger, and you talked to me, just because I asked you to do it. It was very nice of you, and I genuinely appreciate it.’

‘I had fun’, I said, and it was true. There was a bit of a hard edge to her, and she didn’t laugh much, but she was witty, unpredictable, and unafraid. Also, real easy on the eyes, and the red dress didn’t hurt. (‘Yeah, the dress always works’, she said dismissively the next time we met, dressed in a dull pair of pants, a loose-fitting jacket.)

Because we met again, and again. The third time, I mentioned that Dief was a wolf and she got curious, so I called Fraser and half an hour later we were all in a park nearby, doing a general meet and greet.

‘You told him?’ Martha asked me, right there in front of Fraser.

‘Yeah. Just after Warsaw. Sorry, I didn’t think --’ I probably shouldn’t have told him: confidences were confidences. I was unused to the idea of keeping things from Fraser, I guess. ‘Sorry.’

She didn’t seem upset. ‘So now there’s two people who know’, was all she said.

Dief liked her from the start, then he liked her even more when she untangled from his neck a thistle that got caught there on a mad chase across the bushes, and eventually made googly eyes at her when she let him finish the hot dog she’d got from the truck parked at the park’s edge. By then, we were all three seated on a bench, coffees in hand, jackets zipped all the way up. There was no snow, but the December wind was cold, harsh on the skin.

‘If you don’t mind me saying so, Martha, isn’t your particular secret going to be out soon whether you speak about it or not?’ Fraser, politeness personified, must have different criteria than me sometimes, because I had been thinking that, but it seemed rude to ask. Anything about women and looks seemed like a minefield to me. Yet apparently again Fraser’s instinct were right, or maybe Martha was just not looking to feel offended.

‘Sure. I just want to tell my mom first. I thought at Christmas would be a good time? Also, there’s something work-wise I need to see through first.’

After a while, Fraser drove her home. Dief, unaffected by the chill, insisted on taking the long way back to the apartment. I was half frozen when we got there. It earned me plenty of “pitiful human” looks from the wolf, and also some very concerned looks from Fraser, who’d managed to get there before us, despite the pre-Christmas traffic and Martha living quite a way away from where we were.

‘Come here, Ray.’ With warm, gentle hands he took off my gloves, my jacket, and my boots. He brought two blankets from the bedroom, guided me to the sofa, tucked the blankets around my arms so that they fell all the way to my ankles, and then continued to take off my clothes until I was naked under their cover but very, very hot.

I phoned Martha just before Christmas and we chatted for a bit, but she was busy and so was I, so it was brief. She seemed to be doing all right. ‘Say hello to Benton and Diefenbaker from me. Have a great holiday!’, she said, and I promised I would, wished her good luck, and hung up.

***

In the cab that drove her towards Chicago’s outskirts, Martha – self-aware enough to know that her stress levels were through the roof, self-controlled enough to try to counteract it – settled into a relaxation exercise. “Imagine a place where you are calm. It is peaceful.” She tried to think of quiet, wide open spaces. Her mind brought up a meadow surrounded by the boreal forest, and then deflected from the exercise, turning instead to her memories of their trips far out to the boreal plains. The plains were beautiful in a way that gripped her: tangible, grounding. Unlike the alien, surreal landscapes of hot dry climates, the plains left her awestruck every time they visited, and she’d never denied it. Even outside the Park (Benton’s beloved Wood Buffalo National Park, where he volunteered whenever he could), Forth Smith and the area around it was amazing. She was actually doing good business arranging tours for American tourists there, and there was plenty of interest in trips further north, along Dempster Highway, across the Territories – even if the drive to Inuvik, which they did as their family vacation when Zoe was seven, was not something she would personally recommend. Still, the North had things going for it, that was a fact. And it was not like she had never considered moving to Canada, what with Benton’s obvious pining for the place, and Ray’s increasingly bitter tirades about what the lack of gun control was doing to the States, and Zoe’s nagging.

‘Listen’, she leaned abruptly forward, towards the driver. ‘It’s just a question. Do you like it here in Chicago?’

‘I like it just fine’, he said, meeting her eyes in the rear view mirror.

‘What do you like about it?’

‘I don’t know that it’s something specific.’ He thought about if for a minute. ‘It’s just where I wanna be, that’s all. No point being elsewhere then, I guess.’

Martha decided to find his answer unhelpful.

***

Fraser and I did, in fact, have a great holiday: gluttony, sloth, and lust all the way. We visited with my folks, went for a lazy hike in DuPage County, got caught up on the cop shows on TV for which Frase had a weakness. It was a good thing that we did, too, because January, as it turned out, took the cake in the “all crime, all the time” department. We were living between the station and the consulate. We had to hire the landlady’s nephew to walk Dief, because there were literally no slots in our days to do it. One evening we were half asleep on the sofa, exhausted even though it wasn’t late. (Bickering about curling, which was our way of winding down.) When the phone rang, I held Frase down by my side.

‘Let it ring’, I said.

‘It may be the station.’

‘Ben, I know that. The station. Where we just spent all day. So I say, let it ring!’

Yeah, that never works with him. Fraser answers a phone that rings: that’s just the kind of person that he is.

‘Good evening, Martha. It’s good to hear you’, I heard him say, and I sat up, because that was unexpected.

‘Oh no, not at all. That is precisely why I gave you the number,’ Fraser went on. Silence, and some nodding towards the receiver. ‘Of course. May I offer a suggestion?’ Whatever she said, he clearly disagreed with, but he let he speak – until he didn’t. ‘Please, I think I have a better idea. Could you give the driver a different address?’

***

Having alerted Ray to the necessity of proceeding to the horse riding compound immediately, and having explained the reason therefor (‘She what!? OK, you take the car, I’ll have someone here give me a ride, be right behind you!’), Benton checked in with the secretary to let him know he was gone for the day, and then hastily made his way toward the parking lot.

It saddened him to think of Zoe’s grim determination, of what it must have cost her to go down this path. It made him feel a weird solidarity with her, too. She was just nine! Why did she have to find herself in a position requiring such radical steps? Why did she have to resort to measures she undoubtedly thought drastic?

The paradox of it was that he himself was the “why”. To the extent that each of their trio made these decisions, he himself was that reason! Yet it broke his heart every time he had to tell her than no, they were not going north for good. Just for a bit. Just a vacation.

‘Zoe, let me show you something’, he himself had once told her. He put her in the car and drove across the Loop, stopping when they got a good view of Marina City, two slender blocks against the backdrop of the entire city that stretched everywhere they looked.

‘Can you see these two towers?’

‘I can.’

‘The entire population of Forth Smith is just as many people as there are inside these two buildings right now. That’s it, Zo. Just a handful. Look around: so many more people to choose from here. This is a better place to live.’

‘You didn’t think so, before you met Tata and Mom.’

She knows that, because she asked for the story of how their family came together so many times, she can recite it now word for word. She knows of his years in the Territories.

‘No. But possibly, it was just cowardice, reinforced by force of habit.’

Perhaps it was also cowardice, reinforced by force of habit, that was keeping him now in Chicago. Perhaps that was why they were all here: these other three lives entangled with his, so inherently right, amazingly wonderful, endlessly precious. (Actually, four: Dief.) (Actually, ten: the pups.)

***

Martha’s news was that the baby thing was out, and it was trouble. She had told her mom, and the mom was none too impressed, as in, no longer on speaking terms with Martha. She had also told a guy with whom, it turned out, she was hoping to be business partners, and he backed out of the deal.

‘And I am fine, I am. I just wanted to be around someone who is not upset with me, you know? Just for a bit. So, Benton, thank you for the invitation.’

‘Any time. Would you like a cup of tea?’

‘Very much, yes.’

‘Earl Grey?’

‘Sure. I can make it if you show me where you keep it?’

Drinking dried leaves and twigs is something that I’m never gonna understand, but it was nice to watch the two of them bond over it, fuss with the teapot, heat the cups. They were both so pretty: him with the broad shoulders, big hands, strong legs, and her so tiny, with her hair tied up messily, the t-shirt showing off her curves. I was honestly enjoying the show.

She stayed for a couple of hours, hanging out on the floor with Dief for a bit, then vegging out with us in front of the TV. We didn’t have it in us to entertain her, but she was doing fine on her own, completely low maintenance, and the whole thing was so comfortable I would have been spooked if I’d actually paid attention, which I hadn’t. Eventually, she called a taxi, got up, got bundled up in her jacket.

‘Thanks, guys. Thank you.’ And off she was, just like that.

***

Ray was all abuzz in the car on the way to the stables. Firstly, poor kiddo: it took serious guts to quit on one’s three parents in favor of one’s favorite vet. Secondly, he was going to wring her neck the moment he saw her, because what was she, crazy?! Even if it did kind of make sense. Yes, the six puppies were pure awesomeness, a wonderful if unexpected result of Dief’s propensity for mischief and Mischa’s (Doctor Tremblay’s beautiful husky’s)  apparent susceptibility to his wolfy charms. Yes, Doctor Tremblay was great, and remarkably relaxed, considering that he had suddenly found himself with six puppies of suspicious parentage, and the difficult task of finding them homes. Also, yes, the dogs would probably make a fantastic sled team, and Zoe was exactly the kind of person to wrangle a team of unruly young dogs (Zoe: nine going on thirty five, cool and collected, and only ever interested in doing exactly that kind of thing.) And yes, moving to a place where there was snow and space would be a clever idea, if one had a serious intention of having a team. Also, yes, that sort of place would probably see much less of the mindless violence that was driving him insane in his job on the force, and that had driven Fraser all the way out of RCMP and into environmental consulting. So in that sense, yeah, the kiddo had a point. That was Zoe for you all right: she might be crazy, but she was unnervingly, unerringly sensible.  

***

Fraser called Martha a couple of days after her visit, and then I called her, and she called, and then we stopped keeping track. She came over with a lasagne. Fraser sent her home with his home-made loose-leaf tea mix. She came by to walk Dief, a favour while we were stuck on a stakeout. The landlady let her in, but gave her a stink eye. After we had to ask her to do it again, we made her a copy of the key.

‘So what, we’re going steady?’, she asked when we gave it to her the next day.

‘So we are,’ said Fraser, his tone casual, light.

By May, her belly was huge. The baby was fine, and it was a girl. Martha’s mother was still not talking to her, which was tragic if you thought about it really, but also hysterically funny, in that they shared a house (that Martha had bought and paid for). ‘Five months and counting, and we have said maybe a dozen sentences to each other. The horrible thing is, I now enjoy it. It’s very peaceful.’ She was working pretty much non-stop, but she liked it: she loved her business, adored her clients. We had a standing date on Thursdays, the three of us, to have dinner in a _tacqueria_ on Randolph Street. The nights were warm and full of promise, the work was manageable for once, and I thought all was good – but this time, Fraser was way ahead of me. 

‘Let’s go dancing,’ he said, after we finished up our burritos.

‘You hate dancing’, I said, because, yeah, Fraser hated dancing.

‘Nevertheless’, was all I got in return. What kind of answer is that? But Martha said, ‘Sure, dancing sounds fun’, so we got into the car and found a place where we didn’t look terribly ancient by comparison, and we made our way in, holding on to each other, because the place was full and a bit rowdy, turbulent.

Standing just on the edge of the dancefloor, Fraser put an arm around my back, pulled me close and kissed me: a full-on kiss, with tongue, with conviction. With a message – I got that much, although what message it was, I had no clue. Before I could work it out, he was holding one of my hands and one of Martha’s, and he was bringing us together, guiding us towards the dancefloor.

‘Go ahead’, he said, although I could just read his lips, the words lost in a wave of percussion. I looked at him, and took her hand.

I’m good at dancing. I can do ballroom, I can do swing, I can do pretty much anything you throw at me, on one condition, namely that I am dancing with one person at a time. One person and one ball though – well, that’s a whole different ball game, bad pun intended. So a bit of awkwardness ensued, until I ended up behind Martha, holding her close, trying not to jostle her too much. Even pregnant, she was a graceful dancer, light on her feet and responsive, and for a moment there I was floating on the music, on the sway of our bodies in rhythm.

And then I had this _woman_ under my hands, with the curves of her hips and her breasts, with the thin fabric of her top slightly damp where my hands were pressing it to her sides, and her neck smelling of fruit. When her hand came to rest on my thigh -- just a dance move, just a slight turn -- I can’t explain it. I dropped my hands like she was on fire. Said something stupid about getting a drink, went to the bar, got beers for myself and Fraser and a soda for Martha. But there were many more beers after that, and eventually, there was more dancing.

We left the club late. Martha drove us home, on account of us two having had all the beers. Fraser started saying something articulate (now that I think of it, _of course_ he must have had a speech prepared), but I was interrupting all the time. I talk non stop when I am tipsy, all right, so what. The important thing is, we got our point across.

‘You should stay. Like, stay the night.’

Gotta give it to Martha: she was neither shocked nor pretending to be. Instead, she was practical, because that’s what she is.

‘You guys need to talk,’ was all she said. ‘To each other.’

She took a cab and she was gone a minute later. We both noted, Fraser and I, that she never said “no”.

We were standing in the kitchen, a bit drunk, a bit awkward, and amazingly enough, it was still good, still easy.

‘I love you beyond what I ever thought possible, Ray.’ I could see that Fraser had thought about it, Fraser had a plan and was moving through its execution.

‘I know. I mean, you too. I mean, well, you know what I mean.’

‘I do. And please allow me to say, Ray: you have taught me more about nuances of emotion than I had thought myself capable of learning.’

I allowed him to say it. I liked when he said it.

‘Ray, you are my partner, and it is my most sincere hope that we may remain in this partnership truly till death do us part. But I have come to realise recently that, beyond  this relationship, it is for us possible to have family. Well, other family. More family. I think that, in fact, we do. We may just have overlooked it.’

Then it struck me.

‘You, Benton Fraser, want a kid.’ And maybe I also meant “I want a kid” when I said it, but that was old news.

‘It’s more complicated. Martha -- Ray, what is she? Not to me and not to you, but to us.’

‘Martha is Martha’, was all I could come up with.

‘If it is possible for us to have more family, I’d like Martha to be our family. If that is -- if she can be. If that is something you want too.’ 

We probably should have talked some more, but really, what else was there to say? So instead, I switched off the kitchen lights, and I took off his shirt. I put my tongue on his nipples and my hands on the small of his back, and I got lost in his skin and in his blood pulsing underneath, and I kissed him all over till he was trembling, and I took him by his hand, laid him down on our bed, and tried to tell him in a language that I spoke better than English that yes, families were great, kids were great, as long as I could have him all the way, till death do us part indeed.

***

By the time they all arrived at the compound, it was dark. The parking lot was muddy, weak yellow light filtering through the trees. They huddled together by the fence, anxious and upset and uncertain. Martha stood in front of Fraser, bracketed by his arms. Ray gave her a tight hug, then moved to the side, bumped his forehead gently into Fraser’s shoulder and rested it there.

‘So I’m gonna tell you two a thought, all right? And then you can call me insane’, he said, his tense posture belying his light tone.

They didn’t call him insane.

Zoe was sitting on a step stool in a repurposed operating room in Doctor Tremblay’s office, a few feet away from the dog pen. The puppies were dozing off, exhausted after another day of ripping stuff to shreds, chewing stuff into oblivion, scratching stuff to uselessness, and cheerfully peeing on anything in sight. She was writing laboriously in a French exercise book. She froze when they entered, and both Martha and Ray, on the same instinct, immediately rushed down to hug her, to hold her close, murmuring endearments (Martha) and explosive threats (Ray) into the top of her head. Benton crouched slowly in front of her, gave the French exercise a glance and then flashed her a smile of approval.

‘So Zo’, said Ray, breaking out of the hug, bracing himself, trying for his trademark sarcasm and losing pathetically, all the way. ‘How would you like to keep the dogs, and to make a sled team out of them, and to do that in Fort Smith, where we’d live, and maybe even work at the Park?’

***

There’s not much of a story after that, or really, it is a whole different story. Martha came over a few days later and stayed the night. Fraser sat her down on the sofa while he himself stood up straight right next to me, and told her what he’d been thinking – and Martha was sold, because she may be romantic on occasion, but the best way to win her heart is with a plan. She kissed him lightly, sweetly, then turned to me and brought my palms to her breasts, hard and heavy. On our freshly made bed, we were all so very innocent: Martha, tiny but solid, with the enormous belly and boldly curious; Ben, reaching for my body with hot urgency and for her body with endless tenderness; me, a fool, but such a lucky one, moving to kiss Martha between her legs and licking Ben’s hard length on my way down, and the future coming up all around us, tucking us in.

We rented a four-bed three-bath duplex the next week, and moved there over the weekend, because the baby was on a schedule and the only option was to hurry. The practical arrangements took some head-scratching, but in the end, we went for simple. Fraser is very tactile, and me, I’m just that into him, so we’re touching a lot, and the sex is hot, and I don’t want to sleep without him, ever again. Martha’s different. She’s rarely in the mood. (When she is, what follows is usually heaven-shatteringly, ground-shakingly good, and I have flashes sometimes that make me blush and stammer – of her doing things to Fraser, or watching me do things to him and adding an extra little bit from her side.) She also prefers sleeping alone, cocooned Polish-style in a duvet, undisrupted. So Martha simply took the bedroom with most closet space, while Fraser and I took the biggest one. When the basinet and the changing table that Martha had ordered arrived, we put them in the bedroom between the two, and after that, it was pretty much just the waiting.

‘Ray Kowalski’, said Martha to me one morning as we were sitting at the kitchen table, cups of coffee in hand, slowly waking up.

‘That would be me.’

‘That is my point, Ray. If I give the baby my last name, it will sound like it is yours anyway.’

‘All right.’

‘All right?’

‘All right.’

‘So I was thinking. Would you mind if I asked Benton something?’

We each held Zoe right after she was born, slimy and wrinkled, so tiny and so absolutely, impossibly perfect. She got a middle name after Martha’s grandmother, and a first name after nobody at all: fresh and new, just like herself.

We put Fraser’s name as the father on the birth certificate. I held him as he cried, and you know what? Maybe I am, after all, somebody’s feel-good man, because even as he was crying, he didn’t really seem unhappy. He seemed, actually, absolutely not unhappy at all.

 

**Author's Note:**

> My headcannon for how Ray and Fraser got together is Eight Sessions by Speranza (http://archiveofourown.org/works/241902). Knowing that story is not in any way necessary to understand what happens here, but there's an honorary mini-reference to the sessions, just for fun.
> 
> The title is from "Closing Time" by Leonard Cohen, who is both awesome and Canadian.


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